“Gender Imbalance: Women of Color Missing From Op-Ed Debate”

by: Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds

(NNPA Columnist)

Gender Imbalance: Women of Color Missing From Op-Ed Debate

by Rev. Barbara Reynolds

NNPA Columnist

March 16, 2005

"Surely you've noticed, I certainly have, that in our cultural lexicon, all the 'women' are white, and women of color are 'minorities,'" Betty Bayé, editorial writer and columnist for the Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky., told Journal-isms today. "It's usually the case that debates having to do with 'women's issues' are about white women. But let the subject be welfare, crack, prison or obesity, and count on it, the women in the spotlight are women of color, and it's been that way for a mighty long time."

Bayé was among the women columnists of color asked to comment on why their voices are not heard in the latest debate about the disproportionate number of men on op-ed pages.

"It comes down to the numbers game," replied Esther Wu, local columnist at the Dallas Morning News and president of the Asian American Journalists Association. "We simply don't have enough women in the pipeline who are in line to take on the role of editorial writer.

"Newsroom tradition dictates that the coveted jobs go to 'senior' writers, managers and sometimes company officials.

"How many women of color do you see in line for these positions?

"It's not that we don't have anything important to say or that women of color are not deep-thinkers. But I believe that women of color are not taken seriously in the newsroom. We are not contenders for 'important jobs.'

"White women have just begun to crack the code to become managers in the newsroom and women of color are beginning to join them.

"But until we break this glass ceiling, our opinions will not be heard."

In today's round of news on this front, Dave Astor reported, in Editor & Publisher that, "The percentage of female opinion columnists on major-syndicate rosters has risen very slightly since 1999, according to an E&P study.

"E&P looked at the Web sites of eight major distributors, and found that 33 of 135 opinion writers—24.4%—are women. When we previously studied the numbers nearly six years ago, 23.7% of these writers were women (E&P magazine, Aug. 21, 1999).

"Growth has obviously slowed, because the 23.7% figure from 1999 rose nearly nine percentage points from 1989—when 14.8% of op-ed columnists were female.

He noted that, "The percentage of female writers has been in the news lately as Creators Syndicate columnist Susan Estrich has criticized the Los Angeles Times for not publishing more women on its op-ed page (E&P Online, March 7)."

Occasionally, the number of female opinion columnists has been linked with the number of columnists of color.

In his Oct. 1, 2001, article in The Progressive magazine, "Why The Washington Post Op-ed Page Is So Dull," Colman McCarthy wrote that, "In a recent three-month span—May, June, and July of this year—424 columns appeared. Only twenty-six were by women. . . . Blacks and Hispanics were equally shorted."

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Geneva Overholser, then a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group, raised the issue, writing a National Public Radio commentary about the "haunting silence of women's voices" on op-ed pages discussing the tragedy.

"To test my feeling," she later wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review, "I examined the op-ed pages of three of our most influential newspapers: The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times. I found that, in the first week after September 11, they carried eighty-eight signed pieces. Five were by women."

"Numbers for people of color are also dismal," she said privately at the time.

The Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds, former USA Today columnist and a black woman, told Journal-isms today, "As you know more than 90 percent of the decisions make in the news rooms, especially in opinion writing are made by white males, who rarely relinquish control without severe social or economic calamity.

"When they are led to share a token piece of influence or power it goes to those usually found in their own households: their mothers, sisters or wives," continued Reynolds, who now writes for the National Newspaper Publishers Association News Service. "Next on the pecking order are men, even men of color, who white men can sometimes bond with over sex, sports and domination. Women of color, however, are generally not seen as sharing the same values and eagerness to protect white values, institutions and culture. . . . Women of color who are independent thinkers do not survive long in this business. If a woman of color, however, does fight for white values, going against the needs of her own people, that is generally well-rewarded not only with more opinion-writing opportunities, but also to become a part of the punditocracy, which through television and radio helps shape the national political and social agenda."

The women columnists who are speaking out are far from united on the role their gender plays.

In the New York Times on Sunday, Maureen Dowd, the only female among what will soon be eight Times Op-Ed columnists, wrote:

"Men take professional criticism more personally when it comes from a woman. When I wrote columns about the Clinton impeachment opéra bouffe, Chris Matthews said that for poor Bill, it must feel as though he had another wife hectoring him.

"While a man writing a column taking on the powerful may be seen as authoritative, a woman doing the same thing may be seen as castrating. If a man writes a scathing piece about men in power, it's seen as his job; a woman can be cast as an emasculating man-hater. I'm often asked how I can be so 'mean'—a question that Tom Friedman, who writes plenty of tough columns, doesn't get."

But in the Washington Post, Anne Applebaum, that paper's only regular female op-ed columnist, wrote today: "Possibly because I see so many excellent women around me at the newspaper, possibly because so many of The Post's best-known journalists are women, possibly because I've never thought of myself as a 'female journalist' in any case, I hadn't felt especially lonely."

Is there a woman's point of view?

On the National Conference of Editorial Writers listserve, Maura Causey of The Day in New London, Conn., wrote: "In a perfect world it really wouldn't matter that The New York Times has just one female columnist, and the rest are men. All things being equal it wouldn't matter whether or not a woman is on any editorial board. But in reality, to many of us, it does matter, because some topics will—much of the time—speak more to women than to men. The need for paid maternity leave, for example. Child care issues. Flextime. The fact that, until a several years ago, research on breast cancer was underfunded. Should these topics be thought of as 'women's issues'? Absolutely not. Are they of more concern to women than to men? Sadly, most of the time, I think so. Is it useful to have a woman's voice on such issues? I believe it is."

She was responding to another woman who wrote, "Why would I care how many female editorial writers there are? How many female columnists? How many 'topics appealing to women?' How insufferably patronizing."

The imbalance also extends to letters to the editor, an area where readers of color traditionally participate less than others.

In a summer 2001 article in The Masthead, the quarterly publication of the editorial writers group, two Hartford Courant writers documented that two-thirds of their letter writers were men.

They received 150 replies when they asked readers why women don't write.

"The biggest reason was summed up aptly by the woman who wrote a two-word response: 'Too busy,'" the Courant staffers wrote.

"The next biggest reason was fear. Several women related instances of having written letters and then having received harassing phone calls at home, even though the Courant does not give out letter writers' telephone numbers.

". . . Some women said they assumed that letters from men would get preference, or that a woman's opinion would not be taken serious[ly] or that they were raised to think their opinion[s] don't count as much as men's do."